Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday August 30, 2010 @07:47AM
from the really-right-rails dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After two years of gestation, 4 betas, 2 release candidates and thousands of commits by 1600+ contributors, the result of the succesful merge of the Merb and Rails frameworks (and teams) is now out and ready to transport your web applications on all new shiny tracks."

2.3.x is still supported, actually they're working on 2.3.9 as we speak.It's true that the Rails eco system moves forward at a good pace, but that's a good sign to me. it means ideas are brewing and accepted.A sign of good health:)

A lot of the changes have made the code much more modular. You don't need to include everything if you don't need it. This also allows you to plug in other database adapters if you want.
One of the nice routing changes allows you to call Rack or Sinatra applications from within your Rails application.
I'm really looking forward to using this going forward.

One assumption is that the Rails community -- as you said, "straight from the top" -- embraced unsafe GETs and tried to block GWA in order to keep using unsafe GETs.

I don't know if this was ever true, but it hasn't been true for at least two years, probably longer. Rails has embraced REST to an obsessive degree, which means not only are GETs never used for unsafe operations, but if your UA supports PUT and DELETE, Rails will accept those. (If not, PUT and DELETE are emulated over POST -- still not GET.) I met all kinds of fascinating people at Railsconf this year, and we disagreed on all sorts of things, but I seriously don't remember a single person arguing that REST was a bad idea, certainly not that unsafe GETs are a good thing.

jemmyw was the reply which pointed this out to you, though not in as much detail.

So, anyone who was calling GWA "scary" because of this was wrong and either not representative of the Rails community, or you're telling us a story from at least 3-5 years ago, which is a long time in Rails development time.

First, I apologize for getting you mixed up with the person who wrote that Rails had implemented PUT and POST backward, which simply isn't the case. That's what I was mainly referring to when I wrote that you were wrong. But do have another issue with the things you wrote.

You equated one or maybe a few specific people with the "Rails community". David Heinemeier Hansson might be the original author of Rails, but he is not -- even remotely -- the "Rails community", nor is 37 Signals. And you made that error not once, but twice.

First, you describe how GET was often used for unsafe operations (a good description of that is available HERE [moertel.com]). However, using the link_to method as described is hardly "standard practice". In fact it is anything but, regardless of whether DHH and 37 Signals have used it that way. In general, link_to was designed simply for navigating among web pages. The fact that it allows GET to be used for unsafe operations is unfortunate, but the fact is that I know few people who would ever actually use it that way. As someone else mentioned in one of the replies to that post, any framework can be abused. That is generally the fault of the developer, not the framework.

Further, the "rails developers" you accuse of being immature for complaining about it consisted of -- who else? -- David Heinemeier Hansson. Not the "rails community". If you were not aware of this already, then let me inform you: that was 5 years ago and since then the "rails community" itself, on more than one occasion, has derided DHH for his frequent immature behavior.

Your last point, about the word "professional", was again a reference to DHH personally and not "the rails community". Further yet, what he was referring to was the way the word "professional", like some other phrases, has been abused... he was not insulting professionals. In fact he made no references at all to "professionals" or "professionalism".

In summary, you are guilty of accusing a whole multitude -- thousands of people -- of being immature, almost entirely because of the actions of one person. Remind me again... who is being immature here?